


Posthuman

by nicasio_silang



Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:59:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do you intend for the Iron Man to feed the hungry? End war and disease? Eliminate social inequality and poverty?" The guy smiles like he's just been very funny. Tony leans forward, elbows on his knees.</p><p>"I do. I sincerely do."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Posthuman

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after the first Iron Man film.

At the office, in a room with two couches and a view of the hangars in the distance, the ruins of the arc building in the foreground, the interviewer latches on, confused and intrigued. Tony's twitchy, but only in the fingers. Everyone's been asking the same questions, day in and day out, but this kid won't quit. He desperately needs a drink, but Pepper told him to stop drinking in front of journalists and she's watching by the doorway.

"So you're saying the Iron Man armor is not for the military."

"That's what I said. You know, my best friend is a career military man, and I wouldn't do him the disrespect of flying around pretending to be a soldier. I just do what I can."

"But it is a weapon, isn't it? Your first excursion with the suit was an attack on terrorist militants in Afghanistan."

"Is that so?" Tony stops fidgeting. "I'm unaware of that particular outing. The first one I recall was the, uh, tragic incident at my company headquarters, and let me just-"

"The Times has seen some photos that would seem to place Iron Man in Afghanistan days before that-"

"That's nice, son, but I'd point out that, yes, it can be used as an offensive weapon, but that isn't its ultimate purpose. I stopped manufacturing weapons. Iron Man is different. It has applications beyond military muscle." 

He makes a chopping motion with his hand, clenches his jaw, and glances behind the journalist, Greg Something, to see Pepper. She's got that look, she wants him to cut it short, doesn't think he knows what to say. But he's a charismatic guy, never had a problem getting his point across before, no reason to back down now.

"If you'll excuse me for staying in this vein for a while-"

"I never expected you to leave it."

"By your leave, then, what exactly are the non-combat applications of a super-powerful suit of armor that can fly and is loaded with weaponry? Do you intend for the Iron Man to feed the hungry? End war and disease? Eliminate social inequality and poverty?" The guy smiles like he's just been very funny. Tony leans forward, elbows on his knees.

"I do. I sincerely do."

The guy shakes his head. A little breathless, he asks, "How?"

"For one thing, the arc reactor that powers the suit can easily be made into a cheap source of safe, reliable energy."

"With all due respect, and nobody can question your skill as an innovator or an inventor, but all of southern California witnessed what most would say was a very compelling argument against the widespread use of arc reactors."

"Yeah, what, a big light in the sky? A boom? And one building, the one it was housed in, partially destroyed. And that was it. No environmental damage, no public health problems, nothing. The most extreme eventuality, and all we got was a light show and a brief power outage. See, that," he points a finger and shakes it at the floor. "That is the world we should be living in. Where the worst thing that could happen isn't so bad. It's liveable. It's a hiccup, not a catastrophe."

He sounds pretty convincing to himself, even if it's something he thought up in the shower that morning. He can see that soundbyte making the rounds in an hour or two.

"And you think that you can bring this technology to everyone, everywhere? That Iron Man can, well, save the world?"

"Not by next Tuesday, but I could make a good start by next year."

"So, just to clarify your plans, Stark Industries would cooperate with world governments to-"

"Iron Man isn't associated with my company in any way, just with me."

"So you yourself would independently decide who receives the benefits of Iron Man technology. You wouldn't, say, answer to anyone."

Tony feels it sliding away from him, hears Pepper tapping her pencil against her palm.

"Look, I can't have an agency, or a board of directors deciding how and where to apply Iron Man, I can't allow an entity as emotional and politicized as a board to wield that kind of power, to legally obligate me to use the suit for their personal projects, I just can't let that happen."

"Is that the same way you feel about Iron Man coming under the control of the military or the government?"

"No. No, that's different. For one thing, I feel like I've been in the defense game long enough to know what's in the country's greatest interest militarily speaking. For another," Tony leans back and crosses his arms, uncrosses them and smooths his tie. "For another, a very scary man once said to me that the person who has the latest Stark technology could conquer and rule the world. Now, America is a great nation, I don't know about you, but it's my personal favorite nation, however, I think it's time we broke the cycle of this Cold War mentality that the one with the biggest guns wins. It's harmful to other countries, it's harmful to us as a society, it's harmful to individuals. It kills people. It kills a lot of people, all the time, thinking like that. And I'm done being a part of it, I've made the decision to step away."

Greg Something scans over his notes, tries and fails to not look too smug and salivating. Tony's seen that look and type before. Young reporters who think they are, at that moment, participating in history instead of just recording and regurgitating it. Who think they have something on him.

"Mr. Stark, in past interviews you've been vague about your months of captivity in Afghanistan. In the interest of helping the public understand the impetus behind Iron Man, would you care to explain what you went through during that time?"

He sees the animal hunger in the guy's eyes. He wants blood, and guts, and meat. He wants Yinsen's body. He wants to pick it apart. 

Tony says, "No. No, I don't care to. Maybe someday, but not now. I've been approached several times to do a memoir, though I'm tragically young to start that, but." Greg visibly slouches. "I will say though," he ignores the kid and talks over his shoulder to Pepper. "While I was there, I saw my legacy. Not my father's, not my country's, but mine. And it made me sick."

She looks as tired as he feels, standing there. She steps into the room and between him and Greg, tells the guy his time is up, etc. She knows his full name; Tony doesn't catch it. She shows him out and comes back. Tony's bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking out the window.

"Potts, did I just promise to feed the hungry?"

She sits where he'd been on the couch, puts away her Blackberry, tucks her pencil in her hair. 

"Nobody expects you to fix everything that's wrong with the world, Tony."

He taps a fist against his mouth and talks around it.

"I think I could, though. A lot of things, anyway, you know, I think people know I could really figure it out if I put all my energies into it, one thing at a time." He winces, scratches at his jaw. "I'm no good at one thing at a time."

She lets him be quiet for a moment, then asks, "Why did you agree to feed the hungry? I haven't," she shuffles her feet. "I didn't know you were thinking that far beyond disarming the people Obidiah sold to."

He turns around and is hard to look at, framed in the light of the early morning sun. She can't see his face. He sees his own shadow thrown over her.

"He asked me what it was for. There's nothing very superheroic about saying 'revenge'." She probably wants to say something nice now, to make it better, or maybe to call him a dumbass, but he says, "I have to get back to the garage."

 

Motley bits of the Mark2 and Mark3 cover every surface, are strewn around the floor. An entire leg, individual servos, proprioceptive sensor arrays in three different configurations, a wrist joint, kneecap hydraulics, and the faceplate staring up from where it's propped on a keyboard. Tony looks it in the eye, taps absently at the thing in his chest, pours himself a scotch, switches on some music. He starts again.

Pulling apart at the basic components, making a maybe pile, making a piece of crap pile, starting on one project, soldering this to that, holding it up to the light, cracking it against the table edge, tossing it at one of the rolling assistants to run a diagnostic in the other room, putting that one aside, trying something else, disassembling one array, then another, looking at it from above, below, the left, from over the rim of his glass.

Tossing it all and going to work on the holo projector for two hours. Three. Just one leg, just looking at one leg for four hours. Throwing together a model. A wood block, finding a wood block somewhere in the junk room with the scraps, walking the leg around with the wood block in it. It's shuddery. Needs five more stabilizing sensors. Two more pumps. Ten plastic ligaments. 

It's midnight. He asks Jarvis to order a pizza. He needs a shower. He needs his goggles and the laser-hybrid welder. When the pizza arrives, it's Rhodey who carries it in.

"You look like shit, Tony." 

He drops the box on the workbench, in the only square foot of unoccupied surface, and takes in the room, the robots in the corners, sent away hours ago for getting in the way and not working fast enough, Tony at the soldering station, sweating, his empty decanter, his full glass. Tony doesn't look up, makes a "come here" with one hand. 

"Yeah, I need calories, gimmie."

"Sorry, I don't respond to 'gimmie'." Rhodes walks up behind him, knocks a foot against the leg abandoned on the floor. "Take five, man, Pepper said you've been down here since nine this morning."

"Pepper's here?"

"She said she came down a couple hours ago and you didn't notice." He points at a cup of cold coffee on the edge of the desk. "Apparently you were hopping around on one leg and muttering to yourself."

"That was a viability test." Tony finds a place to pause, puts out the solder and looks up. Rhodey looks haggard, so he smiles big. "I'm almost done with this one, my hand to God."

"This one." 

"Yeah," he hefts up the leg with the wood poking out of it that Rhodey had just been kicking at. "Prosthetic leg. Better, actually, more like enhancement, I mean, people will be cutting their legs off to get one of these babies."

Rhodes takes it from him, turns it around, tugs at the wood block that stands in for an amputee's limb. 

"This is bolted in. People going to line up to get screws put in their muscles?" But he's impressed, really, Tony can tell, he's probably impressed.

"I know, I'm working on that part, it'll be done tomorrow sometime, I can bring it to a testing center by Thursday."

"You plan on sleeping anytime before now and then?"

Tony pushes himself up and picks up the pizza, slings himself over the workbench, takes two pieces and sandwiches them together, eats with gusto, real hunger. Around a bite, he says, "I got a board meeting tomorrow afternoon, I can sleep through that no problem."

Rhodey sets the leg down, but he's looking at it when he says, half to himself, "Prosthetics?"

" _Enhancements._ Elastic nanotubes in there, 12J per cubic centimeter, that's, well that's half the strength in the Iron Man, but it's still pretty wow, right? Need to bring down the size a bit, though, couldn't strap that monster on a nice, svelte little lady. Or a kid. Maybe I can get Pepper to let me measure her legs."

"Where did this come from? You didn't even work this hard on finals at MIT." 

Tony laughs around some crust, "Come on, that project was a joke and you know it, it took four days, you could have taken a crap on a pneumatic motor and they would have loved it." 

Rhodey gets some weird look on his face and Tony half-remembers Jim staying up every night that week, the week before, the week after, that he was stressed out and not as much fun as usual, but still, it was a long time ago. 

"I haven't seen you in a week, Tony, you been down here all this time?" He snags his own slice; the whole thing's already half gone.

"Well, I've been busy."

"Making prosthetics."

"That's one thing, yes. Is that so bad?" Tony cocks an eyebrow. "We've always had a medical science division."

"And it's run by guys in clean lab coats who bathe regularly. But you, you stink. Your eyes are red. You go to a board meeting tomorrow like this, no amount of jules per centimeter are going to help."

Tony shakes his head hard, only getting a little dizzy, "No, this stuff is bleeding edge, there's no way they can write this off. Yesterday, that thing," he points at the leg, slumped on his chair, "that was fifteen years from now. There's no way they won't want a piece of that."

"Maybe. Maybe they'll just be confused." His eyes wander to the suit where it hangs across the room. "I know this isn't what I was thinking of when you said you were turning superhero."

"Oh don't even think you get to steal my wheels now, Rhodey, there is no way I'm going to hang that up. For one thing, women can't get enough of it. They want to touch it all over. I've created a whole new subgenre of sexy, it's astounding."

"I don't want your suit, Tony."

"Don't be ridiculous, of course you do. You can't use mine, though, it's all fitted into my measurements, I'd have to fit you for your own, it would take maybe a week or two to knock it up. You might want to work out a bit too, wind throws you around a lot at altitude." 

"You're changing the subject." He takes the pizza away and tosses what's left on the floor. He's a brat sometimes.

"Actually, I'm not. They're all," Tony gestures around vaguely, grandly. "They're all smug and they think it's just another weapon, a big toy with guns all over it which, by the way, it doesn't have. But. But it looks like one. I've used it like one. If they knew what it was like in there, though, in the middle of the sky, by yourself. They'd never question. It's more than a weapon. It has to be." Rhodey's looking at him the way you look at people pushing shopping carts and talking to themselves on the street. "Don't look at me like that."

"I'm not disagreeing with you."

"I haven't lost it, Rhodes, I can do this."

"Okay. Okay, but clean yourself up. Eat something with vitamins. Get some sleep. You weren't the one dealing under the table, you don't have to pay for it." He sits down on the edge of a table.

Tony stands up. He goes back to the leg, prods at small parts without changing anything. 

"But I never asked. I never noticed. Knew Obi my whole life, never noticed." He picks up a pinprick screwdriver and rummages around in the heel of the foot. "We haven't even figured out how long he'd been pulling that crap, it could have been from the start."

Tony jumps when Rhodey's behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. 

"You knew your father. There's no way he would've known and let something like that stand. I knew your father. I'm a good judge of character. Present company excluded."

Tony shrugs, shrugs the hand off. 

"They were best friends." He's in earnest now, stabbing deep into the heel and digging something out. "And they're both gone now, there's just me, nobody else is going to make things right."

Rhodey doesn't say anything for a couple minutes. He watches Tony tug extraneous junk out of the leg. He rotates the holographic model, nods a few times like he understands. Tony grapples with the wood stump, tugs it out, turns the leg upside-down to shake the splinters out. Rhodey gives up. He leaves. Over his shoulder, he says to Tony half-listening, "You call me about my suit."

Tony pauses at 3am to mix himself a martini. He sits down on the couch to drink it and wakes up at dawn. He tells Jarvis to prep the Mark3 for a flight.

 

He says, "Find me a clear patch of sky," and in the left corner of his vision, the path appears. When he turns his body to follow it, he doesn't really turn his body. Like when riding a bike, instead of swiveling the handlebars, the rider simply leans just the slightest bit. The suggestion of a movement, a twitch of his eyes, and he's heading east, flashing over hills to the desert.

Being in the suit isn't like being in a suit. For the first few moments after getting bolted in, before the power comes on, it's claustrophobic, his breathing amplified, it's uncomfortable in the joints. Then he comes online and the space around him is quietly illuminated so he can see in the dark, and he can't feel the armor on him anymore, he's suspended in it like in water. His field of vision is half the world outside, and half raw information through a dozen visual feeds and the whispering in his ears. It's everything he's ever meant to build. Suspended in midair, feeling gravity and feeling stronger than it, he knows it's even more than that.

He's going too fast, he's grinning, and he can't stop.

To the south, he passes a small passenger plane, dangling in the sky like it's standing still. He takes one ricochet swing around it because he can, spanning three miles, the horizon spinning in his eyes, the city and the hills and the desert and the sun, the wind pushing his shoulders like he can feel it on his shoulders, pushing the tips of his toes until they point down and he has to adjust the grade of the repulsor thrust. 

Better than any woman, any drink, any high he's had. Hung in the air just a human body, fingers and toes wiggling in ludicrous altitudes. This is why Rhodey's a pilot, he knows, but he can't really know, Tony wishes he could show him. How he could spread his arms and be shooting straight up into blue.


End file.
